Experimental validation of LMI-based anti-windup compensators for attitude control in multirotor UAVs

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents an attitude control design suitable to counteract the effects of actuators saturation on the stability and performance of multirotor UAVs. The proposed strategy is based on an anti-windup compensator scheme that allows augmenting a baseline cascaded attitude controller in which the inner loop controller is linear. The anti-windup techniques that we adopt are based on the solution of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) and guarantee stability as well as graceful performance degradation when saturation occurs. To show the benefit of anti-windup augmentation, both a static and a dynamic LMI-based compensator have been implemented onboard a quadrotor UAV and their performance has been compared with that of the baseline controller in an experiment that induces saturation effects.